Drunkard's Walk Forums

Quote:As I remember it, the Democrats on Capitol Hill got the bill they
wanted. They were heady, back in the majority, with a new and popular
president, and they didn’t much care about GOP support. They wanted the
credit: It was their bill. They wrote it in a way no Republican could
support. And they got no Republican support. When Paul Ryan, who had
emerged as the Republican point man, attempted to come forward with
ideas, he was rebuffed.

The new president—and this was a key historic moment—decided not to
act on the accumulated presidential wisdom of the ages, which is: Get
the other party in on all big things. Give them a stake in it, use them
for cover, show you have bipartisan juice, that you are truly national
and not only the leader of one party, show you can wield your mighty
power across the aisles. Get them bragging they passed it, with your
leadership. Make them co-own it so that when certain parts don’t work,
and certain parts won’t, they have deep motives to help you fix it.

Instead, a perfect storm of misjudgment, immaturity and lack of
historical perspective, and a perfect storm of shortsighted selfishness
(it’s all ours, it’s not even a little bit yours) brought forth a perfect storm of a health-care disaster.

Quote:As for Landrieu’s bill, if Republicans can’t successfully argue that
Congress has no constitutional power to compel commerce (the basic point
of the successful — in that vein — challenge to Obamacare under the
Commerce Clause), if they can’t argue that Congress has no power to
compel anyone to sell an insurance plan, or, by extension, to compel a
doctor to see a patient, etc., then we’re in sad shape.

Obamacare made millions of people’s plans illegal. By passing the
Upton bill, House Republicans would be striving to make them legal again
for the next year. If insurers nevertheless choose to stop offering
those plans, it will still be Obamacare that set that trend in motion.
What’s more, the GOP would then be free to criticize those insurers and
remind voters that, over the next decade, Obamacare would funnel a
stunning $1 trillion from American taxpayers, via Washington, to
insurers (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile,
Landrieu’s bill is more of the heavy-handed, coercive model of
government that gave us Obamacare to begin with, and Republicans should
say so.

Finally, Landrieu’s bill would undermine the Obamacare exchanges at
least as much as Upton’s bill would. So the Democrats certainly don’t
love it, and it’s highly unlikely they would ever pass it. But if they
did, and if the House and Senate ended up reconciling Upton and Landrieu
in conference, the clear loser would be Obamacare — whose exchange population would just have gotten older, sicker, and costlier.

And then around October 2014, all of those notices about losing your
health plan because of Obamacare would start being mailed out again,
just in time to help voters make an informed choice on November 4.

Outraged yet? If not, may I ask just what in the fuck is wrong with you, anyhow?

Quote:Now, I realize that contempt of Congress is and should be the natural order of things. “The best Congress that money can buy.” “The only native American criminal class.” “No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while Congress is in session.” And that’s just Mark Twain and Will Rogers; the rest of us no doubt have even more pungent observations regarding the collective entity known as Congresscritters.

But the notion that “lawmakers” (stop, enough already!) are worried about “careers” at the public trough ought to be contemptible to every taxpayer. And, if Congressthings had any sense of shame, to the Honorables Themselves. But, of course, they don’t. Only someone with a soul as dead as Little Nell, a hide as thick as Joe Biden‘s noggin, and the moral conscience of Bill Clinton has the effrontery to run for Congress these days, and every attempt to “reform” the system — from the disastrous 17th amendment to term limits to McCain-Feingold (nothing like a “reform” to “get money out of politics” written by the “most reprehensible” of the Keating Five) — has resulted in complete failure.

It’s true that not a single Republican voted for Obamacare upon its forced passage. But neither has the appetite for repeal been very strong since. The House can pass all the repeal bills it wants, secure in the knowledge that the Senate will never go along with them, and that the president would veto any such legislation. Moral preening is, after all, one of the attractions of the racket, and “safe” votes are strictly for domestic consumption. Speaker John Boehner’s sandbagging of Senator Ted Cruz said all that needs be said on that subject.

So I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. If you think Obamacare is bad now — and it’s very, very bad, a direct assault on the most fundamental freedom Americans used to enjoy, which was the freedom to be left alone by the federal government — wait until the “employer mandate” kicks in. Already illegally “postponed” by Obama, it will destroy, by design, the insurance market in the U.S., send the economy into an even worse tailspin than it’s in now, and disrupt the lives and budgets of untold millions of Americans.

For John Roberts was right: in the law’s practical effect, it is a tax, only a tax, and nothing but a tax — and if you think it’s going to fund “health care” for the lame, the halt and the blind, you’re out of your mind. The gullible, naive and the mendacious may not be able to discriminate between “health care” and “insurance,” but that was exactly what Obama was counting on when he sold — barely — his apparatchiks in Congress on the notion that Barrycare would only add to the sum total of human happiness by taking care of the neediest and blah blah blah your doctor, period. That doesn’t make Roberts’ cowardly decision good — he had a chance to put a stake through the PPACA’s heart once and for all, and he choked. It’s a decision that will live in Supreme Court infamy until the day the act is repealed.

In other words, the entire flimflam was a bright, shining lie all along, made possible by the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party and its GOP wing’s continuing complicity in perpetuating the fraud. Remember, “universal health care” has been dream of the Regressives since Bismarck and Woodrow Wilson were pups, and now they have it. Make them own it, and destroy them with it.

We used to think that changing Congress meant changing which party controlled it. Now we know better. Real change can’t begin until the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party is gone.

And with that, it’s now time to enjoy some of the schadenfreude mentioned in my title. Yes, it could be considered ungenerous, inconsiderate, or indecorous to do the gleeful spiking of the ball. But I don’t care; it’s due, and past due.

SO! Who's game for setting up one of those precious, pissy little “we’re sorry, world” websites directed at Tea Partiers now? Because if ever you liberals owed an apology to anybody, you owe a most abject one to the foresighted Americans you derided as insane, stupid, seditious, un-American, and extremist. Because THEY WERE RIGHT ABOUT ALL THIS, and YOU WERE WRONG. Completely wrong. Dead wrong. Wrong as…well, as only dullards clinging to a hundred-year-old ideology that's been an abject failure every time it's ever been tried can be.

Scratch a liberal, find a fascist; hit a liberal in the pocketbook, and find a sudden conservative. All you whiny little shits who were all for turning over one-sixth of the national economy to a jug-eared socialist and his lying henchmen, not one of whom had ever started or run a business in their miserable parasitic lives, are now screeching about how “I didn’t think I was going to have to pay for it!” You special little snowflakes were all stupid enough to buy the ludicrous and self-evidently false idea that if only government took over, coverage could be expanded, treatment would get better, more people could have access to health care, research and development would continue on as before even with a punitive new tax on it…and none of this would cost anybody anything, except maybe that handful of Evil Rich you want to blame for everything under the sun.

And once again, reality has slapped you right in your silly, smarmy faces. Do you have any idea how much those of us who warned you all along of exactly what is happening to you now are enjoying this? No, at bottom we don’t like it; we never wanted any of this to happen, and we do sincerely regret that all of us are now going to be forced to suffer the consequences of your foolishness - but there’s no denying the satisfaction inherent in seeing arrogant "low-information voters" like yourselves getting the comeuppance you deserve.

In fact, not only did you refuse to listen to plain common sense, you attacked and insulted its unwelcome messengers in the most obnoxious terms for daring to tell you a truth you didn’t want to hear. You were suckered by a two-bit Chicago con artist, asserting your superior wisdom the whole time, and now you’re shocked - SHOCKED - that things have worked out so very very disastrously. Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned. You were. Endlessly, and in no uncertain terms. The usual response? “RACIST!”

The truly and beautifully sublime thing about all of this? Not one single
Conservative voted for this. Heck, not even one single REPUBLICAN voted
for this. There was ZERO compromise by Barry and the Democrats. They were so confident in their power that they thought they didn't need the cover that any bi-partisan compromise with the Republicans would bring. (Even if they did have to use some borderline legal parliamentary tricks to pass the thing late at night when no one was watching.)
So our hands are completely clean. This Brobdingnagian failure
is all YOURS to own! Now tuck in for that shit
sandwich you ordered - Bon appetit!
Go ahead and try to find yourselves a second or third job amidst the smoking rubble of Barry’s "Economic Miracle" to pay the exorbitant premiums and spiraling taxes for that “affordable,” non-subpar, comprehensive “insurance” you’ll now be forced by your Caring Government to buy. And continued good luck with all that. The rest of us will be over to the side laughing ourselves sick at you, as you drag us all down into the flames.

If we can’t have our freedom back, well, at least we’ll always have your suffering as some small consolation.
And just remember - WE TOLD YOU SO.

Uh... I'm not gonna claim I don't basically agree with you, but you're getting a bit over the top here.

-Morgan.

Logan Darklighter Wrote:SO! Who's game for setting up one of those precious, pissy little “we’re sorry, world” websites directed at Tea Partiers now? Because if ever you liberals owed an apology to anybody, you owe a most abject one to the foresighted Americans you derided as insane, stupid, seditious, un-American, and extremist. Because THEY WERE RIGHT ABOUT ALL THIS, and YOU WERE WRONG. Completely wrong. Dead wrong. Wrong as…well, as only dullards clinging to a hundred-year-old ideology that's been an abject failure every time it's ever been tried can be.

Well. no. In this one, both sides are wrong, and both sides are clinging to outdated ideologies.

Look at the unbiased international studies. I've mentioned them many, many times in the past. If you folks want affordable healthcare, you're going to have to go socialist on it in order to get the necessary economies of scale. Yes, it's "un-American" - but it's the only thing that will work.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Around here? "Over the top" is what I'm known for. It's not exactly out of character. I do try to keep it reined in somewhat most of the time. But it's been a rough week and just this once I decided to flat out indulge. Besides I feel MUCH better now after having let it all hang out. I figure no one's going to to say " tell us how you REALLY feel!" after this one.
There's oh so much more I could lob into the mix. There's so much more coming down the pipe. And I haven't even mentioned Project Veritas. But that's for later. For now I'm going to go back to just munching popcorn and laughing quietly as the whole thing unravels and hoping that the Rs don't lift one damn finger to hinder whatever happens. Just let the whole damn edifice implode on its own.

Am I the only one who's noticed a distinct difference in tone between both sides of the law's supporters......

Either way.

Seems like modern capitalism is nothing more than finding ways to write more and more blank cheques for the private sector with taxpayer's money. Either directly through funneling billions in taxes and subsidies to private companies for rapidly disemproving services, or by drafting laws that make purchases mandatory, cause anti-competitive monopolies to form or just plain ignoring obvious graft and substandard equipment under the guise of being 'industry friendly'.

It's hard for it not to be an utter clusterfuck for everyone else when the primary aim is just to enrichen the people who pay your campaign donations.

No matter which 'law' wins... ultimately the true winner will be the insurance companies and hospitals. The only difference is who gets screwed over in their favour.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Quote:Dartz wrote:

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No matter which 'law' wins... ultimately the true winner will be the insurance companies and hospitals. The only difference is who gets screwed over in their favour.

Oh indeed. I'm not crying for these people, needless to say. They helped make ObamaCare happen. They were only too happy to see healthy young adults forced into buying their product by a constitutionally dubious mandate and to gouge healthy middle-class people with the new, more expensive plans required by the exchanges. They wouldn’t have partnered with the White House if this wasn’t a payday for them. But now they’re screwed twice over: Not only are Democrats trying to make them the fall guy for the cancellations, they’re looking at their payday melting down into red ink if they take Obama’s “advice” and re-create the old risk pool. Oh well. No honor among thieves.
They're certainly not taking it lying down, though.

Quote:WASHINGTON — The health insurance industry is
already attacking a White House fix to Obamacare on Thursday even before
the plan is formally announced by the president.
“This doesn’t
change anything other than force insurers to be the political flack
jackets for the administration,” said an industry insider. “So now when
we don’t offer these policies the White House can say it’s the insurers
doing this and not being flexible.”

And then - not too long after that, the president of America’s Health Insurance Plans released this statement:

Quote:“Making sure consumers have secure, affordable coverage
is health plans’ top priority. The only reason consumers are getting
notices about their current coverage changing is because the ACA
requires all policies to cover a broad range of benefits that go beyond
what many people choose to purchase today.

“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers.
Premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption of
when consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace. If now
fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the
exchange, premiums will increase and there will be
fewer choices for consumers. Additional steps must be taken to
stabilize the marketplace and mitigate the adverse impact on consumers.”

There’s no policy upside for Democrats in supporting the idea; it’s pure political CYA, and insanely short-sighted in that it’ll only compound their political problem next year if AHIP’s prediction is borne out and exchange plans become even more expensive.

Rich Lowry has an idea about why this has become so politically dangerous to O. It’s harder for Democrats to hide the football this time.

Quote:The great engine of the welfare state is the hidden cost. Usually, the costs of a new program or regulation are too diffuse or distant to matter much politically in comparison to the promise of a direct benefit. This time, the costs aren’t hidden. They are immediate and concrete in the canceled policies and the higher premiums, and they are making the politics of Obamacare toxic.

When otherwise loyal Democrats are on TV seething over being lied to about what’s obviously a subsidization scheme, you know things have gone badly wrong with the usual M.O.

Similar policies are cropping up more and more over here as well, where the obvious aim is just to enrichen someone, somewhere with taxpayer's money under the guise of being business friendly. Britain is considering charging for elements of the NHS - which led to the hilarious image of David Cameron demanding more austerity while wearing White Tie, sitting on a golden throne and drinking champagne.

There's a picture of modern politics if ever there was one.

I like how the fact that people on both sides seem to be giving the insurance companies a buy on this. When frankly, that right there is the heart of the problem. Nobody dares challenge them for fear of '!Communism' - not the contents of a book by Karl Marx, but the abstract terror of Cold War annihilation that still lingers in the back of people's minds. There's no political will to tackle what is clearly an industry that is causing harm to a good number of people. Arguably, it's the base insurance industry itself that has caused such an explosion in hospital bills - because a good number of people will have insurance anyway, insurance companies are able to negotiate better rates than the book-rate the hospital offers, and having such massively high rates benefits both the hospital as negotiating leverage (And encouraging people to buy insurance when they know a broken arm will bankrupt the average household).

It's not about making insurance uneccessary for most people -which might rock the boat for the companies a little - but by making insurance available for more people by making it mandatory for everyone who falls outside of government programs- which suits the companies just fine. Especially the part about subsidised premiums.

I've sat out most of the argument on the merits of the law - because frankly, in my opinion, both sides are flat fucking wrong, but it's impossible to say that both sides are flat wrong anymore because everyone must take a side. Does the system need to be reformed - yes, it does. Badly. Horrifically. But already that's enough to push me to one side before I say that this most definitely is not the way to reform it. Ultimately, the sides people take seem to be governed more by which order they say that in, than what they actually feel on the matter.

Furthermore, reducing a concept as complex as the ACA down to a single word that means two seperate things depending on what side of the debate your on, that you can either be for or against depending on what party you support rather than picking and choosing from the various contents and having an educated opinion, makes it so much easier to either ram through - or kill outright. It shuts down all the real debate on the matter and stops the real reforms that're obviously necessary. It's either all-in, or all-out and is symptomatic of a serious failure in modern democracy. It's a demolition of informed debate and opinion.

But. my biggest fear - and the reason I've been watching this - is that this bullshit will be exported as an example of another 'Business-friendly' policy that the privatisation-hawks over on the continent will shove down everyone's throats. Even worse - the scumbags will call it employment friendly and dress it up in fancy language to make people swallow it. When in truth, it'll be anything but. (You don't make money by hiring more people, you fire as many as you can get away with, cut everything right to the bone, then leave people no other option so you can do the absolute bare minimum to keep the government from fixing it - or worse, pay 'em off). Frankly - the private sector fucks things up far more than it fixes them.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

And the hits just keep on coming!

Not sure if any of you remember this, but there was a "success story" of Obamacare that was made into a pretty significant part of one of Barry's speeches. A woman from Washington State signed up for coverage for herself and her son in October, the Washington state O-Care exchange quoted her a monthly premium of $169 after subsidies. Wonderful, she thought, and dashed off an e-mail to O congratulating him on his policy triumph. He read that e-mail at his presser in late October in the Rose Garden.

Meanwhile, back in Washington state, his correspondent was receiving new letters from the state O-Care exchange — which, mind you, is supposed to be one of the better functioning systems in the country.

There’d been an error.

Quote:Sanford said she received another letter informing her the Washington state health exchange had miscalculated her eligibility for a tax credit.

In other words, her monthly insurance bill had shot up from $198 a month (she had initially said $169 a month to the White House but she switched plans) to $280 a month for the same “gold” plan offered by the state exchange.

Rate shock, part one. But then came the sequel:

Quote:Last week, Sanford received another letter from the Washington state exchange, stating there had been another problem, a “system error” that resulted in some “applicants to qualify for higher than allowed health insurance premium tax credits.”…

The result was a higher quote, which Sanford said was for $390 per month for a “silver” plan with a higher deductible. Still too expensive

A cheaper “bronze” plan, Sanford said, came in at $324 per month, but also with a high deductible – also not in her budget.

Her problem is both simple and complicated. Read this Washington State Wire
post for the complicated part. The first erroneous premium quote was
due to — surprise — the feds and the state not having their act together
in calculating subsidies. The feds were expecting each applicant’s
annual income; the state gave them each applicant’s monthly income. That
led to a massive overestimate of how much taxpayer money each applicant
was entitled to. The second bad quote came from poor advice given by
the state itself: They encouraged her to enroll her son, who has ADHD,
in the state Medicaid program, but they didn’t tell her that that meant
he couldn’t be counted towards her federal subsidies for her ObamaCare
plan. After the second adjustment, she was entitled to no subsidy at
all. The Kafkaesque result, per CNN: “Now I have been priced out and
will not be able to afford the plans you offer. But, I get to pay $95
and up for not having health insurance.”

That’s the complicated part, although don’t confuse “complicated” for
“unanticipated.” When you remake one-sixth of the country’s economy,
you’re destined to have lots of screw-ups and inefficiencies even with a
competent administration in charge. As it is, we’re stuck with people
who pegged the success or failure of the country’s biggest domestic
reform in 50 years to their ability to build a functioning website and,
despite three years’ lead time and hundreds of millions of dollars
available, still couldn’t do it. On the other hand, though, the issue
here is mercifully simple: New plans on the exchange simply cost too
much for lower middle class people. Obama and the insurance industry
needed the new plans to be more expensive than the old “cut-rate” ones
in order to fund the de facto subsidy for covering preexisting
conditions; that’s a burden that the upper middle class and, with great
effort, the middle class itself can bear, but for lower middle class
people who make slightly too much each year not to qualify for subsidies
in paying their premiums, the Affordable Care Act ain’t all that
affordable. It’s Obama’s misfortune that he chose the letter from this
woman, of all people, to tout at the White House as evidence that the
program was working. He’d have been much better off picking someone who
was very poor and unquestionably entitled to a subsidy as a showpiece.

Update: Speaking of misfortune, when it rains, it pours.

Corruption, thy name is Obamacare. Is that the smell of ACORN?

Time to shine a bit of light into some more dark corners and see what lies beneath. A system is bureaucratic, top-heavy and complex as Obamacare is ripe for abuse and mistakes even with well-meaning people manning the system. What if you have not-so-well-meaning people? There was always the chance that Obamacare navigators could be bad actors, urging people to lie about their income or health, as new video from Project Veritas suggests they already are.

Quote:James O’Keefe, the guerrilla videographer who helped bring down ACORN (the “community organizing” group that Barack Obama worked for as a lawyer and trainer) and got NPR’s president fired, is back.

This time, his undercover investigators focused on Obamacare’s “navigators,” the nearly 50,000 people who, in the words of the Department of Health and Human Services, “will serve as an in-person resource for Americans who want additional assistance in shopping for and enrolling in plans” on the Obamacare exchanges (at least when they’re finally working). The total value of grants doled out for nonprofits and community organizations to hire navigators has topped $67 million nationwide, and some of the money is going to a group run by ACORN’s highly controversial founder.

The events of O’Keefe’s video of a Texas navigator site run by the National Urban League are a familiar sight to viewers of his past efforts exposing Medicaid and voter fraud. Government-paid workers supposedly trained to uphold the law advise clients on how to lie on government forms, evade legal requirements, and ignore proper procedures.

HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius admitted in an exchange with Sen. John Cornyn that there is no requirement that navigators, who have access to your most important personal information, go through a criminal background check:

Quote:“Isn’t it true that there is no federal requirement for navigators to undergo a criminal background check,” Cornyn asked her.

“That is true,” Sebelius answered. “States could add in additional background checks and other features, but it is not part of the federal requirement.”

Cornyn pressed, “So a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them?”

Sebelius answered, “This is possible.”

But the navigators are by no means the only open window for crooks in Obamacare. There's the trainwreck of the website itself, which did not even go through a top-to-bottom security check before launching.
As a test, CBS gave one technology expert the real healthcare.gov username of a CBS employee, and within seconds, he identified the specific security question she used to reset her password.

Sean Henry, the former assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said the security issues need to be taken seriously.
“If somebody’s got the ability to look at a source code and able to reverse-engineer that and identify what somebody’s personal questions are, that should be of concern,” Henry said.

Politico:

Quote:Early stumbles on the hobbled Obamacare website —
password glitches, incomplete testing and fractured development —
underscore considerable safety risks and hint at deeper vulnerabilities,
data security experts warn.

Lawmakers seized on those concerns Tuesday and will most likely do so
again Wednesday, reverting attention to a process that has astounded IT
specialists…

A software tester recently discovered a series of potential security
flaws, including one in the site’s password-reset function that would
enable a skilled hacker to access users’ email and security questions.
Another allowed a password-reset request to send information to
third-party analytics companies such as Pingdom and Google’s
DoubleClick. A report this week indicated that a North Carolina man
logged on to the site only to receive eligibility information about
someone in another state.

Tavenner called the latest concern a “personal identification issue,”
the agency corrected. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius labeled the password glitch a “theoretical problem that was
immediately fixed” and insisted at a recent House hearing that the
website stores “the minimum amount of data.” The Senate Finance
Committee on Wednesday is expected to question her further.

These issues, while small, go against industry best practices the
administration says it follows. Security analysts fear they hint at
bigger bugs in the system. Such weaknesses might not only allow hackers
to access personal information but make it easier to engage in
clickjacking — a process where harmful links appear like legitimate
portions of a website — or pharming, where criminals direct users to a
bogus site and take their information.

Obamacare is a system so complex, so incompetently administered that
it doesn’t even require malice on the part of navigators or the bill’s
allies to screw up people’s lives royally. What if you add malice and intent to the mix?

Quote:With millions of Americans frustrated and bewildered by
the trouble-prone federal website for health insurance, con men and
unscrupulous marketers are seizing their chance. State and federal
authorities report a rising number of consumer complaints, ranging from
deceptive sales practices to identity theft, linked to the Affordable
Care Act.

Madeleine Mirzayans was fooled when a man posing as a government
official knocked on her door. Barbara Miller and Maevis Ethan were
pitched by telemarketers who claimed to work for Medicaid. And Buford
Price was almost caught by another trap: websites that look official but
are actually bait set by fly-by-night insurance operators.

I know for damned sure I don't want my information going through this security sieve. But maybe those of you who were such big believers in government run healthcare would like to put your faith in them? "By all means, after you, Francois!"
 

Quote:As a test, CBS gave one technology expert the real healthcare.gov username of a CBS employee, and within seconds, he identified the specific security question she used to reset her password.

Minor point of order. Given cursory information about someone, guessing the answer to their security question is quite simple.

Quite frankly, on the IT side of things. It's exactly what could be expected of a system so hideously complex, built from the ground up with minimal testing, by a combination of dozens of low bidders and donation-friends of various politicians. Half of the hideous mess is a result of the complexities of the law, various subsidies, credits, rebates, fingerings and felony concerns.... and doing it nationwide.

Edit" Well, there's your problem....
It could probably be summed up in 4 letters...... SAIC

Quote:As you look down the list put together by the Sunlight Foundation, it's all companies like this: giant monstrosities which are simply tied in closely with the government. All the large consulting firms are listed: Accenture, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, McKinsey. What's missing? Basically any company with even the slightest smidgen of experience building and maintaining large-scale, public-facing web-based apps. The list has no "internet native" companies.

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Absolutely agreed Dartz. It's big government in the form of "crony capitalism" (which is a damn long way from the free-market capitalism most conservatives and tea partier's believe would actually help the healthcare system) come back to bite Obamacare in the ass. 

OMG... This just keeps getting better and better! By which I mean worse and worse for the right people.
Remember when this happened in Pittsburgh
in the second week of the ObamaCare rollout? At least this time,
Kathleen Sebelius signed up more people on her visit yesterday to South
Florida than she did in Pennsylvania. A whopping two people managed to get all the way through the failing website to enroll in insurance during this media event at the office of an official ACA navigator:

Quote:Sebelius, wearing green, walked through the front doors
of North Shore Hospital near Miami Shores where she shook hands with
hospital staff and members of the Epilepsy Foundation who are staffing
the Obamacare Navigation center housed off the hospital’s lobby. There
she met with the team helping South Floridians to sign-up on line or on
paper.

“So she is being helpful,” asked the secretary to a couple sitting at one table of a navigator. “Absolutely,” they responded.

At a second table, the secretary met Carmen Salero who was trying to
sign up online. As the secretary and Salero made small talk, CBS4's
Brian Andrews noticed the site crash on the lap top in front of them.

“The screen says I’m sorry but the system is temporarily down,”
Andrews pointed out. “Uh oh,” responded the secretary. “That happens
every day,” said Salerno, “it must mean a lot of people are on there
trying to get coverage.”

Actually, it doesn't. It means that the front end of Healthcare.gov
still can’t handle anywhere near the promised level of demand, even
though the law makes enrollments mandatory. And the one failure wasn’t a
fluke, either:

Quote:“It went down three times,” said Williams referring to the site, “but we’re just going to keep trying,” he added.

What was that I seem to recall about insanity being defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?
Why would the White House want Sebelius to do these live media events when the website is so unstable that repeated crashes end up on the news? If this happens every day, wouldn’t it be better for Sebelius to stick around the office and run the rescue operation? After all, according to Dan Pfeiffer, that’s enough to keep Barack Obama from appearing at the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
Man, this schadenfreude flavored popcorn tastes astoundingly good!  ^_^

what makes this even more funny is that 3 guys in their "basement" built a working version inside a week. Stable, doesnt give anyone any trouble in their tests, the only problem, it gives you the tiers and prices up front, not at the end or after you've entered all your "private" data
 

Quote:Rajvik wrote:

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what makes this even more funny is that 3 guys in their "basement" built a working version inside a week. Stable, doesn't give anyone any trouble in their tests, the only problem, it gives you the tiers and prices up front, not at the end or after you've entered all your "private" data

Oh we can't possibly have that! Then people would be able to see what's there and then back quietly out and then the government wouldn't have them enslaved... er... I mean enrolled! Enrolled in the system, yes. And what about all the juicy kickbacks we give to our political donors... I mean contractors! (sarcasm tags as needed)

Rajvik Wrote:what makes this even more funny is that 3 guys in their "basement" built a working version inside a week. Stable, doesnt give anyone any trouble in their tests, the only problem, it gives you the tiers and prices up front, not at the end or after you've entered all your "private" data

Because A) The system doesn't need to deal with the kind of scale, B) it probably does not reflect the various state law ideosynchrasies, C) It doesn't have the anti-fraud systems the official one has to have, D) They don't need to deal with large organisation beurocracy.

It is certainly possible to roll out a system of this scale in the time they had, but that would have required strong leadership and management, and a willingness to tell states that since they didn't want to implement their own exchange any changes they want in the exchange... well too bad, it gets put in the after roll-out task-list, this includes changes in statelaws regarding healthcare, etc (ah I can hear the states that didn't want to cooperate howl). That way you are working towards a fixed set of objectives not a constantly changing set. I do note requirements where still being changed until just before the rollout. Garanteed disaster that, you need a fixed set of requirements to work towards if you are going to do it quickly and well.

Second you should probably rely on an internal team, not contractors, and if you are relying on contractors go hire someone that knows how to do this, talk to google, or perhaps microsoft or... basicly any of the providers that know how to build scalable systems. Hell the NIH could just look at who has done well in projects like CaGRID, which is fairly large scale and hire those contractors instead of the set they hired that is more adept at navigating the federal beurocracy and at leaching money than doing their task. (Ah I can hear congress howl about their pork providers not being treated fairly.)

And finally The order of priorities should be; Works, Scalable, Complies With Rules, Pretty. Instead the Priority was pretty clearly, Looks Pretty, Complies With Rules, Works, Scalable. Yes purple text on a black background looks very nice, until you try to read it, and while the sins of the website where not that bad it was very clearly designed to look pretty first and foremost, but then that is often all that non-technical management sees, and even technical management won't see more unless they dig in. This is a very common problem. (Ah I can hear upper management howl about the looks. Get it working as black text on a white page before adding images, css and everything else.)

You don't need to do all three, but you better do at least two of them, and do them well if you are skipping one.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

This is not a defect with the ACA. This is a defect with government culture....

If three guys can do a good job of it, why weren't they hired?

There're two possibilities:
1: Nobody ever got fired for hiring Big Name Brands like Northrop, SAIC and the like - no matter how poor the service they offered was in actuality. Because the brand still speaks volumes. Hiring three guys in a shed is a risky thing, and people in Government positions hate risk. Because if they hire three guys in a shed, and the thing tanks - well the natural question is 'Why did you hire three guys in a shed?'. When if they hired Northrop to do it, well, they made all the right moves hiring a known quantity that has completed hundreds of government projects in the past... so it must be someone elses fault if it tanks. Some analyst's head rolls at one of the big companies and it all rolls along.

2: Three guys in a shed didn't have the money to buy enough congressmen.

Either one is a cultural failure, and is not something exclusive to one particular administration.

What I find funny however, is that while we might agree on what the problem is - the solutions we'd offer would be entirely different.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Also - the Website failing isn't even the main issue. It's funny as hell, yes. But frankly - Barry and crew should be GRATEFUL that it's failing so hard.
Because millions more people would be suffering sticker shock and discovering just how badly they've been screwed. Besides the millions who have already been sent cancellations from their insurance companies of course. And that's not even counting what will happen next year when the employer mandate kicks in and most companies dump their employees health care and leave them to the tender mercies of "The Exchange".
"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."   Is likely going to go down as one of the biggest, baldest lies in history. It will easily eclipse "Read my lips - no new taxes!" and "I did not have sex with that woman!" in the public memory.

I still like how nobody's dared criticise the insurance company's for the rate increases - instead laying it all on the President's doorstep. Everyone seems to assume they're just acting fairly and ethically and won't ever under any circumstances take advantage of circumstances to their benefit. Being in business does not automatically make one more concerned for your fellow man's welfare - especially when your product is mandatory, and you make you best profits by finding loopholes to deny your captive customers the product they paid for when they finally need it. Is it even possible that some companies may be happily taking advantage of it just to bilk more money out of people and post record profits at the end of the year?

You're happy to point the finger at the president. But nobody dares touch the industry.

Why is the insurance industry being given a free pass? When argiuably they are at least as responsible... if not more so.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

dartz you really cant blame the insurance companies, they're being forced to increase coverage and you can't blame them for covering their bottom line by increasing the cost the same level as they have to increase coverage. Also they are being forced to cover people they wouldnt have covered before due to pre-existing conditions.
 

Presented without comment (since it's almost Thanksgiving and I'm kinda busy.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

I may have nearly reached the limits of my verbiage on this subject (for now) but Bill Whittle - who is much better at turning a phrase than me - has a lot more to say about the Hammer of Reality that is about to hit us all. But it's especially going to hit progressives hard. 

How DID the Obamacare website cost the American Taxpayer 20,000% what it should have? 



Yeah. A billion. With a "B" - for "Banana Republic" which is where we're headed. 

Ah yes - the 1%. The rich. The people who the progressives say they hate soooo much. 

Guess what, chumps? You've been DUPED. AGAIN. You in the 99% - you just got OWNED by Obama and the elites at the top of the political system. 

Well it's been a month since I opened this topic. And there's been only had one half-hearted attempt at counterpoint and that was Rob saying words to the effect of "both sides were wrong" which was pretty lukewarm. Damn near room temperature even.

I mean c'mon! Where's the firebrands? Where's Ayiekie? Where's MFnord? Where's RevDark or ordnance11? Or Epsilon? 

Where's the point by point breakdown about how wrong I am and how all of this is just the "usual teething problems" of a new social program and that it will all work out and we conservatives are fools for opposing this etc etc. 

Hell - failing that - where's the last ditch attempts at shutting me down by calling me a racist for daring to question Barry's lying ass?

Here's what I think - I think for once all of you on the left KNOW you're fucked 10 ways from Sunday** and that there's NO defense possible of this train wreck. But you'd never - NEVER - not in a million years - give up the satisfaction of even acknowledging it by even admitting this thread ever existed in the first place. 

That's okay. I'm perfectly cool with that. 

Your silence says everything I need to hear. 

(** Well to be fair - we're ALL fucked, liberal and conservative alike. )